Typical single-crystal inorganic photodetectors can suffer from a basic tradeoff of absorption cross-section for background noise. For each unit thickness of absorbing bulk inorganic material, the possibility of a thermally generated electron-hole pairs increases. These thermally generated charge carriers contribute to the dark current of a photodetector device, and thus require the devices to be operated at extremely low temperatures to suppress this dark current, and increase the detectivity (D*) of the device. The size and power-consumption attributes of equipment for cooling typical existing detectors have hindered the development of compact multi-color (“hyperspectral”) imaging system, and limit system efficacy by confining the existing detectors to large sized platforms.